fugitive frequency episode 3 is themed trocar or exchange. As discussed by Léo Custodio in the program, it implies solidarity amongst activists, researchers and artists who come together across power differentials. fugitive radio will continue to pursue this idea to think about dialogues, collaborations and networks that link marginalised communities and how these relations and infrastructures develop counter-hegemonic power. How might this notion of trocar problematised state-backed neoliberal discourses and initiatives of multiculturalism and diversity?
This episode features pre-recorded and edited conversations with the following guests:
Léo Custodio, is a Brazilian-born scholar and activist based in Helsinki. Alongside journalist Monica Gathuo, Léo co-founded the Anti-Racist Media Activist (ARMA) Alliance, who facilitate collaborations and exchanges that bridge the worlds of academia, culture and activism across Finland and Brazil. Léo authored the book Favela Media Activism: Counterpublics for Human Rights in Brazil (2017) based on his PhD research into community media in Rio de Janeiro. He is also organises the Activist Research Network with Camilla Marucco.
Tania Nathan, AKA ‘The Chindian Queen’ [Instagram] is a Malaysian-born poet and author who also lives in Helsinki. Nathan’s recent book Daughter of Immigrants (2020) was funded by ARMA Alliance.
‘Butter Toes’ and ‘Little Boxes’, are community organisers who have negotiated many obstacles as they publish and distribute the first queer anthology of Bangladesh, Boithoki Golpo [Instagram]
Media related to guests, music and productions featured on the program are below. – – – – –
fugitive radio: fugitive frequency will be broadcasting on the first Tuesday every month at 17.00 CET on CoLaboRadio, Freie Radios – Berlin Brandenburg: 88,4 MHz in Berlin, 90,7 MHz in Potsdam and streaming on https://fr-bb.org/
fugitive frequency episode 2 is themed ‘homing’. It refers to an instinct characteristic of certain animals that are able to find their way back to their homes, and also to technological devices that enable missiles to seek and hit their targets. ‘Homing’ serves as prompt to think about how to navigate and position oneself in a globalised world. Also, how does one make a home under conditions that are increasingly inhospitable; due to structural violence, colonialism, climate change, etc. Episode 02 is another patchy audio essay featuring the music of Sofia Jannok, Maxida Märak, A Tribe Called Red, Mari Boine and MF DOOM; the voices of Timimie Märak and John Trudell and a conversation with Jari Tamminen.
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Links related to the people and themes discussed in this episode.
Árvas Foundation ‘Árvas tundra is the name of the wide open tundra where Sofia Jannok’s home is around, in Luokta-Mávas Sámi reindeer herding district on Swedish side of Sápmi. Árvas tundra is roadless land, undestroyed by machines and been generously taken care of the indigenous Sámi people for generations. Árvas means ‘generous’. Above all Árvas tundra is grazing land for the reindeer, our source of life, our protector and our future. http://arvasfoundation.com/
An interview by The Final Straw Radio (TFSR) with Maxida Märak, a Sami activist and hip hop singer, and Gabriel Kuhn, an anarchist activist, translator and author, about Kuhn’s book ‘Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North’. The book contains a political history of the Sámi people, whose traditional lands extend along the north most regions of so-called Sweden, Norway, Finland, and parts of Russia, as well as interviews conduced with over a dozen Sámi artists and activists. This interview was published originally in June 2020 (from Anarchist Radio Berlin).
Fugitive Radio: Fugitive Frequency will be broadcasting on the first Tuesday every month at 17.00 CET on CoLaboRadio, Freie Radios – Berlin Brandenburg: 88,4 MHz in Berlin, 90,7 MHz in Potsdam and streaming on https://fr-bb.org/
Episode 01, ‘Born to be Wireless’ is an audio essay of sorts, sketching out some of the issues and themes that will be explored in the coming year, such as: feminist and anticolonial network infrastructures, politics of remix, antiracist media activism. It features the voices of Fernanda Monteira, Gilberto Gil, Amoc, Ailu Valle, Jenni Laiti and Suohpanterror! amongst others.
Over September and October 2020 I was privileged to participate in Onassis AiR ‘School of Infinite Rehearsals, Movement I’, convened by Hypatia Vourloumis in Athens. Alongside Federica Bueti, Anastasia Diavasti, Moriah Evans, Daniel Hui and Kostas Tsioukas we produced three podcasts for Movement Radio.
Episode I: Refusal (aired 5 November 2020)
Episode II: Refusal Against (aired 12 November 2020)
Episode III: Sound Is Migrant (aired 26 November 2020)
»Nepantlas« is an online program curated by Daphne Dragona. It focuses on projects that introduce social and technological infrastructures based on relationships of care, respect, and interdependence.
For Nepantlas #4 Irina Mutt and I will be performing an ‘audio fanzine’ live online for Akademie Schloss Solitude. Our performance will be followed by a Q&A. Attendance is limited and prior registration is required to participate. Please register until November 17, 2020 with signup@akademie-solitude.de
Curated by Daphne Dragona November 19, 2020, 2–3:30 pm (CET)
Guests of the fourth online edition of »Nepantlas« are Sumugan Sivanesan and Irina Mutt. Both run »Fugitive Radio« : an urban artistic research project on radio as a social practice, which is designed as a platform for migrant voices and experiences. »Radiowalk Helsinki« is a live radio fanzine developed as part of »Fugitive Radio«.
»Fugitive Radio« is an urban artistic-research project about radio as a social practice. It proposes to be a platform for migrant voices and experiences and is aligned with anticolonial trajectories. »Radiowalk Helsinki« is a live radio-fanzine that is developed as part of »Fugitive Radio«. As with Gloria Anzaldúa’s ideas about »mestiza«, it is an inclusive, accumulative and elastic structure, operating between thresholds as a way to embrace contradictions and ambiguity. It approaches the means and infrastructures of online radio as instruments of dispersal and play. Drawing on the ephemeral qualities of micropublishing and (online) performance, it employs strategies of replication, disruption and distribution.
»Radiowalk Helsinki« listens into urban environments and network processes, weaving through fragments of texture, text, voice and music. It links listening to haptic experiences of scrolling, browsing and clicking to accentuate experiences of migration, fugitivity, surveillance, precariousness and interdependence. For this special »Nepantlas« session, the audience will experience a »radio-fanzine« and explore how performance can become a means of publishing. Shifting across platforms and navigating collectively, »Radiowalk Helsinki« will examine the possibilities and impact of performative distribution when it comes to addressing urgent topics of our times.
»Fugitive Radio« is a project by Sumugan Sivanesan. In collaboration with Irina Mutt, the project will evolve over the coming year across a series of workshops, productions, podcasts and events in Helsinki. »Fugitive Radio« is being developed in collaboration with Pixelache and is supported by the Kone Foundation. It will culminate as a series of live broadcasts/interventions at Pixelache Festival #Burn____, June 2021.
…is something Sophea Lerner from {openradio} said in a recent production meeting. It just so happens that I trialed a hybrid outside-online ‘forest broadcast’ at the end of summer in a clearing behind Sophea’s apartment block; amongst woodpeckers, wind, moss, a light drizzle and chainsaws.
The broadcast was to test a set-up that took a live microphone feed of environmental sounds, an audio stream from Jasmine Guffond’s Listening Back browser extension which sonifies cookie activity, and a feed from our ‘Forest Chatter’ Jitsi meeting, that was fed through WIDI Audio To MIDI convertor and mixed and processed in Ableton Live. The ‘music’ was broadcast into my forest surrounds and also looped back into our Jitsi instance. WIDI’s software takes in sounds, converts them on-the-fly into MIDI notation which is then played out through it’s range of soft-synth instruments. In trial mode, the plug-in would go silent intermittently, thus the performance brought a number of chance operations into play; forest sounds including broadcast audio, (surveillance) data sonification and audio from Jitsi.
Alice, who was in the meeting, imagined an orchestra hiding behind the trees, which I thought was a lovely visualisation. As something of a new experience for us all, I am interested to experiment more with how participants might listen and interact across multiple locations in such networked/situated events.